“I like to laugh, and I am drawn to certain people in my blissful process,” said Nolan Lefort.

When Nolan Lefort was a little boy growing up in Galliano along Bayou Lafourche, he liked to tromp through the woods to a ridge 2 ½ miles away to Bayou Raphael. There, he would commune with nature in a solitary state. During those times he was, in his heart, an epic hero of the magnitude of Beowulf. He arrived to vanquish the dragon, but the dragon was a gigantic banded water snake. In this Cajun epic, Nolan defeated the snake armed only with a pocket knife. Thus, began the imaginative life of Nolan Lefort, scientist and artist and teacher.

Impressionistic brush strokes are ably handled in the portrait of John Glenn, who flew the Friendship 7 mission in 1962. Kathleen DesHotel

“Every new challenge is a puzzle to solve. I judge my parameters, what materials I have, how I can manipulate what I have to find a solution. Usually, it is the simplest and most natural idea that works best. Sometimes the answers come to me when I am asleep or when I am in a deep relaxed state right before sleep comes. It’s a combination of the logic of science, the creativity of art, and then the magic beans I keep in my pocket,” he said chuckling.

His wife, Debbie, said she has never seen a problem he couldn’t solve. “He is such an amazing person. I haven’t found one thing he cannot do and do well. He single-handedly built his sculpture studio. He can do electrical, plumbing, construction, gardening and cooking; the list goes on. As an artist, he has explored most every media and has had success. With amazing creativity, Nolan has the rare gift of being extremely right- and left-brained. He was a wonderful science teacher and Talented Visual Art Program teacher. Oh the stories ...” she exuded.

Nelle Landry, retired art teacher, said, “Nolan is such a great guy. Working with him, he came across as a quiet kind of fellow with a seriously wonderful twinkle in his eye. What he doesn’t say verbally, he more than makes up for with his incredibly innovative, whimsical artwork. That twinkle shows up in his art in a wonderful way.”

Lefort credits his seventh-grade teacher for stirring a desire to become a teacher, a certain kind of teacher who understands his students and brings schoolwork to life.

“I struggled with academics, was not a good reader and hated to be called on to read aloud; it was embarrassing. Without saying anything, my teacher knew this and gave me other things at which I could excel. He showed me science books, especially biology, with beautiful drawings. I could replicate these drawings with all their beautiful colors of life. This poured over into other subjects, like when I read Lord Byron’s ‘Prisoner of Chillon,’ and I drew what I envisioned as the isolated, imprisoned martyr who seeks solace in nature,” he explained.

It was his love of the environment and how it works that triggered his college interests — majoring in biology, chemistry and geology.

As a science teacher, Lefort shared those interests, and students couldn’t wait to get to the class. His tie tack alone was enough to entice the junior high youngsters to hurry to class. Depending on the day’s lesson, the tack might be a leaf, acorn, seed, opossum embryo or electronic resistor. His hall pass was a taxidermy rat, and his Christmas tree was decorated with gilded petrified fish, frogs, bird skeletons and worms.

Believing that everything in life is a dance between matter and energy, he enjoyed teaching by mixing subject matter. In his art classes, he brought in fossils to draw and shared his own appreciation for the origins of life. Everything is interrelated in Lefort’s way of thinking. He added physics as another major to his sciences after serving during Vietnam, and took art classes as electives. Thus, he found a love for many art forms, with current favorites being oil, printmaking and wire sculpture. Using wire is like drawing in three-dimension. One of his works combines an oil painting of an electric chair with a looming wire sculpture coming out and forward from the top of the painting. It is one that he does not want to give a title because he wants the interpretation to come from the viewer.

At a recent show in a hotel, the work was accepted among others for a one-month exhibit. When he went to pick it up, Lefort could not find it, so he asked the manager of its whereabouts. It turned out that the man was so moved (in some direction) by it, that he could not look at it and put it away. In Lefort’s mind, that was OK as a powerful reaction; in his wife’s mind, the manager had broken an agreement.

Lefort said that those kinds of occurrences tend to level out, and cites another event: “I had to submit one piece of work to an exhibit in Hammond, but I didn’t know what to turn in. Debbie pushed me to come up with something, and I discovered a frog I had carved in stone long ago. He was in our garden buried under other rocks and was filthy. I hosed him off, let him dry, and brought him to the exhibit where it won Best in Show. Go figure.”

“I continue to learn and to grow mentally; I am on a bit of a ‘magical mystical tour’ through life. I don’t complain about things. I just flow in the flux of things,” he said.

Having been diagnosed with cancer, he said that he did not get upset. “Existence to me is a magical thing. If we study a particle and see it act as a wave, we realize that all we are is a flux in a complex dance of which we don’t always have control. I am using my mind to manipulate matter; rather than being devastated, I dwell on the positive side of progression, pushing the limits of life, like following a trail in the woods.”

Regardless how deep he thinks or how intellectual and scientific he is, Lefort is always drawn back to humor in his art. Often described as whimsical, his capriciousness is always counterbalanced with underlying introspectiveness and an interpretative bent. His wife remembers coming home from work one day after Hurricane Katrina and finding many of his whimsical people piled onto the trash along the street. The sight made her cry, but all Nolan told her was, “I can always make another one.”

“I like to laugh, and I am drawn to certain people in my blissful process,” he said. This summer, he and his wife went on a train vacation toward the southwest. “Life was not in our way. We just traveled on the train to Chicago, Arizona and the Grand Canyon. I danced at a right-of-passage ceremony where a young Indian got his feathers from his grandfather. We saw the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde, Hot Springs, the Rock Church in Sedona, saw the location of the holy, healing dirt called el pocito in an Adobe-style church where crutches of those healed lined the walls. Families were filling Ziploc bags, and mysteriously the pile of dirt wasn’t getting any smaller. I do not question or over-think these mysteries. I accept them and realize that there are some things I will not ever know. All in all, it was a very healing summer.”

The epic thinker, Nolan Lefort, who still holds his high school’s record for a 9-foot, 1-inch standing broad jump, explained, “Good comes to us if we embrace the force of the cosmos. We must seek confidence in contentment, and understanding in our relationships so they become natural. We must enjoy whatever we are doing with elements mutually accentuated, and find happiness in being alive.”